Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners DAC: computer Soundcard vs CD Player?

I'm wondering if it would make a significantly improvement if I burn all the MP3 files onto CDR and play them with a CD Player that support MP3? Or do you think I better off relying on the soundcard's DAC to decode them?

For now I have the older SoundBlaster Live 5.1, so far I couldn't hear any interference or anything but I think it could sound better though. I don't know if I should get a new CD-Player with MP3 capability or just get the M-Audio Revolution 5.1/7.1 soundcard that everyone raves about, the M-Audio has a very good spec it's like S/N 107dB and THD 0.002%. My HK 3480 stereo receiver doesn't has any digital input and it doesn't has DAC either, so either way I'll still have to run the analog line to the receiver.

The limiting factor here would be the actual MP3 format, and to a lesser extent, the software (or hardware in the case of the stand alone CDP) MP3 decoder. This has nothing to do with which sound card you use.

I suggest you download Foobar2000 as it has the best decoding engine for MP3s out of the software players (in my opinion). It has internal support for 64 bit precision, and it can output up to 32 bit floating point (but your SB Live will limit you to either 16 bit or 24 bit fixed point). This will have limited sound quality benefit, if any, but there is something very useful that it can do.

In addition to being able to output in various formats, it can work around that evil little 48 kHz internal up sampling problem that all Emu 10k1 or 10k2 chip-based sound cards (such as the SB Live, Audigy, or even high end cards like Emu's APS) have. This problem arises because the EMU chip can only do DSPs and other effects at 48 kHz, so everything that passes through it is resampled at 48 kHz, processed, and then converted to the output format. This wouldn’t matter if the resampler was of high quality, but it is not. So how do you work around this? This is done by enabling the resampler DSP and then setting it to 48 kHz at high quality (slow mode). In the future, if you chose to use digital output, make sure you leave the output format at 48 kHz, or else you will be introducing yet another sampling rate conversion.

Yet another feature of Foobar2000 is that it will let you select if you want to enable dithering, and which type you would like. I suggest Soft ATH noise shaping at 24 bit fixed point or Strong ATH noise shaping at 16 bit. Try both of these settings and see if the sound quality gain (if you notice any) is worth the extra CPU cycles.

Have you considered FLAC, or another lossless audio codec?

It's strange to see mention of SACDs and DVD-As in the same forum as MP3s - which direction are we going with audio? Better fidelity or smaller file size?

Bren R.

Good suggestion BrenR...

FLAC and monkey audio are GREAT lossless alternatives to MP3! They do have bigger file sizes, but it is worth it, in my opinion. If you chose to keep with a lossy standard, why not try Ogg Vorbis. It uses a better compression algorithm, so a 192k .ogg sounds much better than a 192k MP3. Finally, if you are completely intent on retaining MP3 format, try enabling VBR in lame, and setting the quality preset to 10 or 11.

The whole MP3 debate I don't think will ever come to an end. I have been ripping with EAC and lame for years at 320 and to be honest, I can fool almost anyone who sits in my basement. I had the owner of a local high end shop over one night and I played a track by ZZ Top that was ripped per the above and had the same song going in my cd player. He could not pick out what was what. This guy is no slouch when it comes to having a good ear. He sells Dyna matched with Krells, so he's use to hearing good sound.

I'm sure there are some audible differences but the question is can the human hear pick them up? If the MP3 is of iffy quality sure. If you take a bad CD and rip it, you get a bad MP3. If you take a good CD and rip it, you get a better MP3.

As far as lossless encoder goes, I have been using Monkey Audio and Musepack. So far I can not hear the difference when comparing to the original wav that I ripped off of the CD, My ears could be deceiving but I suspected the soundcard might be the reason. I've heard lots of folks swapped out their older Soundblaster 5.1 live or newest Audigy Z2 to the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and they swear it made a very noticeable improvement.

For MP3 playback, I have a bunch of MP3 that were encoded in 256 to 320k, most of the time I use Zoom Player and sometime I use the winamp with MAD and some other codec that suppose to have the ability to decode 24 to even 36bit, I'd played with several settings and didn't hear any difference.

Now here's another question, If I play my music CD through my PC's CD Player and use the Soundcard analog output to my HK 3480 , would the sound quality suffer or inferior to the "real" CD Player such as Denon 370/380 5-disc changer or HK DV22??

Last night I went to Bestbuy and bought a decent Sony DVD/CD single disc player, analog output has S/N of 115dB, cd dynamic range 96dB, and 0.003% THD. I tried about 10 to 15 music cds and few mp3 cdr switching back and forth between the Sony and my computer, after 4 to 5 hours of messing around, to my surprise I found absolutely NO difference in SQ!! Another shocker is that my Soundblaster live 5.1 sound just as clean as the Sony, NO audible interference whatsoever, and the S/N ratio appears to be identical as well.

My conclusion is:
1)either the Sony DVD/CD player is absolutely crap,
2)or using computer with decent soundcard as the source, is just as good as many mass-market dvd/cd players out there.

needless to say, I took the Sony DVD/CD player back today and get my money back, next thing I'm going to try is to buy the M-Audio Revolution soundcard, this soundcard is being praise and prefer by many HTPC users, was told it really outshine the Soundblaster in music and dvd playing, and that it has far superior DAC that rival many high-end DVD or CD player out there...

I'm surprised the noise level was so low with the sound card... no good reason but I expected there would be more noise on quiet passages as an unavoidable result of living inside a PC.

One other point is that some sound cards are better for audio, others for gaming. My understanding is that :

- original SB and SB/Live clock at 44 KHz and are good for audio;

- Audigy 1 clocks at 48KHz and is better for gaming but not so good for audio because CD has to be resampled to 48 KHz

- Audigy 2 is essentially "best of both worlds" -- original SB performance for audio (+24 bit) and Audigy performance for gaming

Let us know how the M-Audio works out -- as you say it is supposed to be better than any of the above for audio.

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One other point is that some sound cards are better for audio, others for gaming. My understanding is that :

- original SB and SB/Live clock at 44 KHz and are good for audio;

- Audigy 1 clocks at 48KHz and is better for gaming but not so good for audio because CD has to be resampled to 48 KHz

- Audigy 2 is essentially "best of both worlds" -- original SB performance for audio (+24 bit) and Audigy performance for gaming

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Actually, that is not exactly correct. While you can "clock" (select the sampling rate) for the SB Live and Audigy to whatever you want, they still resample to 48 kHz to process and then resample it again to output sampling rate (if it's different than 48 kHz). This is just built in to all Emu 10kx chips, there is no way around it, as even high end cards based on the 10kx platform suffer from it (Emu APS is an example). The SB Live uses the Emu 10k1 and the Audigy uses the Emu 10k2, both of which are part of the 10kx family. The Audigy 2 could be different though, as I don't know what chip it uses.

By the way, the Audigy 1 is superior to the SB Live in all aspects other than its surround mixer. SB Live's surround mixer supported output in Dolby Prologic, so if you don't have 6 ch input on your receiver, you could still get surround sound. Creative took it out of the Surround Mixer for the Audigy and Audigy 2 because of lack of consumer interest in outdated technology. Neither of these cards are "good" at music, as M-Audio's Revolution 7.1, Terratec DMX 6-Fire, or even a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz are all better. Out of these, the 6-Fire would be the best, Revolution would come in as a close second, and the TB would be third, but still better than Creative's offerings. Would the differences be noticable? Aside from the sampling rate (which can be worked around in software as I mentioned earlier), not particularly.

If you intend on keeping an Audigy or Live card (or any 10kx based card, for that matter), I suggest getting the kxproject drivers... They aren't as good for games (only basic EAX 1 and 2 support and I am not even sure if they support the dead A3D standard), but they are better for music, as you can fully disable all DSPs with a virtual "map" of your chip and its inputs and outputs. Also, if you do recording, it supports ASIO like the big cards do .

EDIT: Apparently the Audigy 2 uses an Emu E-DSP. Sadly, though, that doesnt fix the nasty resampling problem.

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So, we award the Audigy2 the title of Audigy Service Pack1. This is exactly what we expected from the Audigy a year ago. However, this time we also do have some complains. The tests results indicated that 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz unswitchable resampling is still used.

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I was shocked and strongly doubt the interconnect and speaker cable made by Bettercable have anything to do with the noise floor and interferance, but that's what I've been using on all equipments, they're kinda $$$ but very well construct and seems durable. Initially I thought my pc was inferior to any DVD/CD players and concern about interference and crosstalk that might of taken place, that's the main reason why I'd started this post, then went out and bought the Sony DVD/CD player in hope to improve the SQ, obviously that didn't happen so I'll stick with using my pc as the source, I have couple hard drives configured in RAID 0 so with about 600GB of disk space available, I think this is a far better jukebox than any CD Changer out there LOL.

A quick research on google came back with lots of reviews and comparison between the M-Audio and SoundBlaster Audigy Z2, and multiple visits to hifi and av forums concluded that, for music and dvd playback the M-Audio Revolution 5.1/7.1 blow all SouldBlaster card (including the newest Audigy Z2) out of the water, on the paper the Audigy Z2 has better spec, but in the real world the M-Audio has much better frequency response, the graph looks flat and all reviewers and HTPC users prefer the M-Audio, it's cheaper than the Audigy Z2 as well, I'm sure there's lots of better cards out there, but they're much more expensive and doesn't justified the performance difference.

For gaming, no doubt the Audigy Z2 is the way to go, but for me the M-Audio is the clear winner. I don't need to take out my Soundblaster either, so they can be switch back and forth.

Check out these reviews:

http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/revolution71/rev-5.shtml

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/m-audio-revolution71/